Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

The UPS guy hopped back in his seat and put the truck in gear. Marian unbent her knees and sat flatly down on the Van Dilden with her legs extended in front of her. This had the effect of pushing the Royal Welsh Fusilier deeper into her ass. It was like a fleshy tail. “I’ve got toys up my cunt and up my ass,” she moaned. The truck started bumping and jostling. She pulled the length of the Fusilier up against her tailbone and bent it around her hip and found that, as she had hoped, the other end easily reached her clit. She pulled back its “foreskin” and held the slick second head against herself. “Oh, fuck” she said, feeling all of her circuits starting to get busy.

“Is that about right?” called the UPS man. He was driving manfully from one gulley to the next, steering with one hand. His other, Marian saw, was in a fist, pounding up and down on his surprisingly meaty coral-gabled cock. His brown UPS pants were around his knees, the zipper splayed open and ready to rip. The dirt road sloped down.

“Starting to feel nice,” called Marian politely. Then her voice changed to a command. “Now pump the brake . “She held the hem of her skirt with her chin so that she could look down at her spread vadge. The road was pounding the Van Dilden’s cockshape into her stinging cuntskin. She reached back and twisted the Fusilier in her ass. Her clit looked as if it were ready to jump up and propose a toast to old friends; the other end of the double-header was sitting solidly to one side of it, talking in the fast, even, confident nasty-rumor language that vibrators use with their clit-clients. She felt a gorgeous huge thick-muscled orgasm moving slowly up her legs and fanning out toward all orifices. She spat her skirt out. “Pump the brake harder!” she commanded again. “Oh shit! Oh God! That’s it. Pump it. Brake, brake, brake. That’s it, like that. FUCK ME WITH YOUR TRUCK! JACK THAT BIG UGLY DICK AND FUCK MY ASS WITH YOUR TRUCK!”

The UPS man, his leg pushing the brake-pedal in rapid rhythm to the long white-knuckled strokes of his fist, looked as if he couldn’t hold back another second. The truck lurched and rocked. A box from Harry and David’s tumbled over beside Marian. She grunted down against her toys, feeling them stretch her sex-holes to the point of pain. “Now watch me come!” she called to the front seat. “Keep pumping the brake and watch this hot little cunt come! I’M COMING! AAAAAAAAH, fuck fuck fuck, coming, I’M COMING!” She pressed the silicone snake-head harder against her clit and let the truck-chassied orgasm bump and grind through her.

The UPS man had his head cranked around and was watching her crammed crotch, pop-eyed. He made a vowelly groan and lifted his butt clear off the seat. “Oh, here it comes!” he said. With a final upward fist-stroke, his squat thick dick blew a united parcel of peckerpaste all over the sleeve of his uniform. “Ooh, yeah babe. Ooh yeah.”

He put the truck in neutral and the two of them caught their breath. Marian stood unsteadily, smoothing her skirt. The Royal Welsh Fusilier fell out of her ass to the floor with a snakey thump. The UPS man sighed happily. “The tightest ship in the shipping business,” he said, shaking his head.

“That’s me,” said Marian.

When the brakes had cooled, he drove her home. And for several months afterward, whenever John the UPS man delivered a white box and Marian the librarian was at home, he helped her test out the sex toy that it was certain to contain. Without him, too, Marian had large numbers of outdoor-gasms on her ridem mower, helped by several dilda, and when she was done mowing and coming for the afternoon, she often arranged a towel in the sun in the back yard and lay there for an hour or two with her glasses folded near her hand, smelling the smell of cut grass and gasoline and sex juice on her fingers.

AS A PIECE OF ROT THIS WAS, I KNOW, A SMIDGE KEYED-UP in places, but for a first attempt I felt it would do. It was fun to write. But much, much more fun was watching my sunbathing companion read it. I had spent so much time alongside her that I felt she was an old friend, and yet I had no idea how she would react. I stared at her mouth through the binoculars. (She had put on sunglasses.) Every line that she read was a personal triumph for me; every time she moved to the next page I was in absolute heaven. This was a pleasure the likes of which I had not known. Even before she started reading, the sight of her pulling the bag from the sand and undoing the silver twist-tie made my heart swat in all directions,like the Cocoa Puffs rabbit. I wanted her to be holding and reading my home-grown smut so, so much! I so much wanted to have inspired a feeling of quickened curiosity in her. To have done just that — to have created an expression of puzzled curiosity in the universe, where before there had been only a woman lying in a green bathing suit in the sun on the beach, digging in the sand.

And — I wish I could whisper this for dramatic effect— she did get a little turned on —she did, she did. The first sign of it was when she glanced around to verify her dune-grassed isolation and then subtly lifted her upper body a little higher on her elbows so that her titshape elongated, and then when they, her two laggard cherubim, were hovering almost free of the earth, she moved her shoulders so that her nipple-tips grazed lightly over the open mesh-lined cups of her undone bikini top. I debated stopping time to hold them for a moment, but I decided that I wanted to see her reaction continuously, without interruption. A little later, on about the fourth page of my typescript, she scratched her leg for a long time, apparently forgetting that she was scratching. I took this as a good sign, a sign of absorption. Then she pulled her chin in suddenly, surprised by something, and shook her head. She looked around. She resumed reading. Then it began: the rhythmic antiphonal tightening of her butt-muscles began: first the left, then the right, left right, left right, so that her heart-shaped ass-curve systoled and diastoled before my eyes. I knew that these marching contractions were pushing her bush-bone hard into the towel and into the accommodating sand underneath, and the sight of this secret self-assertion got me so hot and frantic that to work off the energy I had to drop the binoculars and push up my glasses and sprint down the length of the beach, slaloming barefoot around the halted family groups and single shell-musers and grizzled voyeurs. On the way back, running more slowly, I hesitated before a tall girl of sixteen or seventeen in a blue maillot standing in an inch of water, recoiling from the cold, and I stopped for a second, panting, so that I could slide her tight shoulder straps off and regard her white, hippy, sexily imperfect body with her suit turned inside out on her legs. “You’ll do just great,” I said to her as I suited her back up. Then I resumed my binocular station near my assive-aggressive reader and let myself calm down. Strangely, I felt a little guilt that I had been unfaithful to her with the seventeen-year-old.

She read the entire story, and when she finished she put it back in the plastic bag and twisted the twist-tie around it and buried it in the sand where she’d found it, marking its existence with three little shells. Then she reached back and re-clasped her top and turned over. I watched her stomach rise and fall as she breathed. I fancied that she was breathing a little faster than she would have been if my words hadn’t just gone through her mind. I was in her mind. There were things about what she had read that she didn’t like, or that seemed dumb to her, but even so it was working on her and making her want to go home . She sat up, put on a loose faded shirt that went almost to her knees, unpinned her hair, and walked up a path to a set of newish condos on one end of the beach. I did the usual business of pausing her as she unlocked the door so that I could slip past her and hide somewhere in her apartment. I hate hiding in women’s apartments when they are there, because I suddenly become in doing so an intruder, and all those awful hider-in-the-house movies inescapably come to mind, and the music threatens to turn tritonally ominous. The last thing in the world I want is to be seen as a threat.